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The hospitality industry worldwide is among the hardest-hit industries from the COVID-19 lockdowns. Initial theoretical and practical observations in the hospitality industry indicate that business model innovation (BMI) might be a solution to recover from and successfully cope with the COVID-19 crisis. Interestingly, some firms in the hospitality industry already started to successfully adapt their business models. This study explores the why and how of these successful recovery attempts through BMI by conducting a multiple case study of six hospitality firms in Austria. We rely on interview data from managers together with one of their main stammgasts for each case, which we triangulate with secondary data for the analysis. Findings show that BMI is applied during and after the crisis to create new revenue streams and secure a higher level of liquidity, with an important role of stammgasts.
Reacting, fast and slow
(2021)
The COVID-19 pandemic created extraordinary challenges for governments to safeguard the well-being of their people. To what extent has leaders' reliance on scientific advice shaped government responses to the COVID-19 outbreak? We argue that leaders who tend to orient themselves on expert advice realized the extent of the crisis earlier. Consequently, these governments would adopt containment measures relatively quickly, despite the high uncertainty they faced. Over time, differences in government responses based on the use of science would dissipate due to herding effects. We test our argument on data combining 163 government responses to the pandemic with national- and individual-level characteristics. Consistent with our argument, we find that countries governed by politicians with a stronger technocratic mentality, approximated by holding a PhD, adopted restrictive containment measures faster in the early, but not in the later, stages of the crisis. This importance of expert-based leadership plausibly extends to other large-scale societal crises.
This article is aimed at analysing local and intergovernmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany during the ‘first wave’ of the pandemic. It will answer the question of how the intergovernmental system in Germany responded to the crisis and to what extent the pandemic has changed patterns of multi-level governance (MLG). The article argues that the coordination of pandemic management in Germany shifted between two ideal types of multi-level governance. While in the first phase of the pandemic the territorially defined multi-level system with the sub-national and local authorities as key actors of crisis management was predominant, in the second phase a more functional orientation with increased vertical coordination gained in importance. Later on, more reliance was given again on local decision-making. Based on this analysis, we will draw some preliminary conclusions on how effective MLG in Germany has been for coordinating pandemic management and point out the shortcomings.
This cross-country comparison of administrative responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in France, Germany and Sweden is aimed at exploring how institutional contexts and administrative cultures have shaped strategies of problem-solving and governance modes during the pandemic, and to what extent the crisis has been used for opportunity management. The article shows that in France, the central government reacted determinedly and hierarchically, with tough containment measures. By contrast, the response in Germany was characterized by an initial bottom-up approach that gave way to remarkable federal unity in the further course of the crisis, followed again by a return to regional variance and local discretion. In Sweden, there was a continuation of ‘normal governance’ and a strategy of relying on voluntary compliance largely based on recommendations and less – as in Germany and France – on a strategy of imposing legally binding regulations. The comparative analysis also reveals that relevant stakeholders in all three countries have used the crisis as an opportunity for changes in the institutional settings and administrative procedures.
Struggling over crisis
(2018)
If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.” Following the premise of this quotation attributed to Winston Churchill, varying perceptions of the European crisis by academic economists and their structural homology to economists’ positions in the field of economics are examined. The dataset analysed using specific multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) comprises information on the careers of 480 German-speaking economists and on statements they made concerning crisis-related issues. It can be shown that the main structural differences in the composition and amount of scientific and academic capital held by economists as well as their age and degree of transnationalisation are linked to how they see the crisis: as a national sovereign debt crisis, as a European banking crisis, or as a crisis of European integration and institutions.